Having lived on a boat for years, I can tell you right now, you show me a body building midget, and I'll show you an amazing marine mechanic.

Craftsmanship is also highly valued on a boat...

I have issue with almost all of your points. - Dex & wisdom would be the important stats for sailors IMO (i am not saying strength and con are useless, but just not as important, they would be 3rd and 4th IMO). - Darkvision wouldn't do a damn thing, its range would barely get off the side of the boat. - Poison resistance is not disease resistance. - Some spoiled food would be poison, but some would also be disease (depends on how it spoiled and the food). - In order for short stature to be relevant to ship design, they would need a completely custom designed ship tailor made for them, which would have benifits but sounds unlikely for what pirates would be sailing. (That being said, a dwarven merchant ship designed speciifcally for their stature would be a massive pain for normal height characters to battle on) - lower speed means they swim slower too which means going overboard is even worse.

Similar to vampires, every dwarven ship has an enormous boulder occupying a conspicuous place in the quarters. Sleeping near this "home stone" is necessary to prevent dwarves from going sea crazy.

These are all problems humans already have and try to get around. A few adventurous and entrepreneurial dwarves is all it would take to kick start the golden age dwarven naval empire. I am looking at this from a fun world building viewpoint and I find this idea exciting.

Dex is valuable for tall ships, but steamships and ironclads, str/con is the way to go.

*I am a dwarf and I'm sailing a ship* *Saily saily ship* *Saily saily ship*

Ah like in Warcraft 2 you can have submarines with dwarves

Dex would be super important for them too. Cannons of all flavors aim with dex due to being ranged weapons.

What is this, dwarves for giants? Those fuckers are at least 5m tall, goddamn.

Ditch the earth, hit the surf!

Get out of the tunnel and swab the gunnel!

Ran a Pirate campaign once. Had a pirate faction of Dwarfs called the Reefbeards. They lived up, under and along the water for so long, they had colorful corals growing in their beards. They also had a lot of cool technology, so they shot grapplehooks to swing over and ran around with entire cannons on their back.

My previous character was a Dwarf Marine (barbarian, path of the ancestral guardian). He was wielding an anchor as a 2-handed weapon. He met his fate killing a sub-boss.

Splittermond, a German RPG, has a culture of arctic viking dwarves. It's perfect.

tall ships are a hate crime to dwarves

For sure wisdom being the highest priority unless they always sail near the coast, but to be fair you only need 2 people with high wisdom

One of my favorite campaigns I was a tempest cleric dwarf in a sea campaign. She came from a clan of dwarves that would take longboats along river coasts downstream from a mother clan's mountain mining to find pockets of washed down minerals. It was so fun and eventually she started her own seafaring clan the Sundersalt. We were based on an island but controlled a lot of trade in the area with ships modeled after Korean turtle ships

The copper dwarves are excellent sailors.

Get off that rock, we're about to undock!